By November 2025, the first reveal trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI (commonly referred to as "Trailer 1"), originally uploaded to Rockstar Games' YouTube channel on 5 December 2023, had accumulated approximately 268 million lifetime views. This figure made it, depending on the methodology used by individual outlets, either the second-most-viewed trailer ever published on YouTube or — in NME's framing — the single most-viewed trailer in YouTube history, overtaking Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War (2018) trailer, which had held the lifetime record at approximately 267 million views (Shutler, 2025; LibertyCity, 2025). The milestone was reached almost exactly two years after the trailer's emergency release, which itself had been triggered by a low-quality leak hours before the planned debut, and it confirmed that GTA VI remained the most culturally dominant single piece of pre-release marketing material in the contemporary entertainment industry (Wikipedia contributors, 2026).
Trailer 1 was released to celebrate Rockstar Games' 25th anniversary and served as the formal reveal of Grand Theft Auto VI, confirming the title, the Vice City setting, the dual-protagonist structure of Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, and an initial 2025 release window for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). The 90-second clip was scored to Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road," a track that subsequently saw a near-37,000 per cent increase in Spotify streams and almost a quarter-million Shazam searches in the days following the trailer's debut (Shutler, 2025; Wikipedia contributors, 2026).
The trailer's early lifetime performance was already record-setting. It broke the record for most first-day views on a non-music YouTube video within twelve hours, accumulating 46 million views, and within 24 hours reached 93 million views to become the third-most-viewed video on YouTube of any kind in that window (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). It also became the most-liked game trailer in YouTube history with 8.9 million likes in 24 hours, and surpassed the lifetime view count of Grand Theft Auto V's 2011 reveal trailer within two days at 101 million views (Wikipedia contributors, 2026).
By January 2024 the trailer had climbed to roughly 168 million views, making it the second-most-viewed game trailer ever, behind only Rockstar's own Grand Theft Auto V trailer at that time (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). The ascent continued steadily through 2024 and 2025. On 11 November 2025, NME reported that the trailer had reached 268 million views, overtaking Avengers: Infinity War and becoming, in NME's analysis, the single most-viewed trailer in YouTube history across all media categories (Shutler, 2025). LibertyCity corroborated the figure at 268.6 million views with 12 million likes and approximately 250,000 dislikes, citing the same cross-over against the Infinity War trailer as the threshold moment (LibertyCity, 2025).
Wikipedia's edit history frames the same milestone slightly differently, describing the trailer as "the second-most-viewed trailer ever by November 2025, with 268 million" views, with the framing dependent on whether music videos and other promotional formats are counted as "trailers" for ranking purposes (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). The discrepancy reflects a long-standing methodological inconsistency in trailer ranking: NME's framing treats the cross-over against the Infinity War trailer as decisive, while encyclopedic sources adopt a more conservative ordering that retains certain other promotional videos above GTA VI in the all-format hierarchy.
NME's article, authored by Ali Shutler and published on 11 November 2025 under the headline "'Grand Theft Auto 6' now most-viewed trailer ever, overtaking 'Avengers: Infinity War'," framed the milestone in straightforwardly superlative terms: "GTA 6's Trailer One currently has more than 268million views compared to Infinity War's 267million" (Shutler, 2025). The piece situated the achievement against two contemporaneous developments: the second delay of the game itself, announced on 6 November 2025 and pushing the release date to 19 November 2026, and ongoing fan speculation that a third trailer would drop within the same month (Shutler, 2025). NME also reiterated the trailer's earlier achievements — fastest 24-hour view accumulation for a non-music YouTube video and the Tom Petty streaming surge — drawing a direct line from the trailer's record-breaking launch in December 2023 to its eventual capture of the lifetime crown nearly two years later (Shutler, 2025).
The NME coverage is significant because the publication is widely cited across the games and entertainment press, and its framing of the milestone — explicitly as a victory over a Marvel Cinematic Universe trailer at the peak of that franchise's box-office dominance — embedded the achievement in a broader narrative about gaming's cultural parity with, or supremacy over, blockbuster cinema as a marketing spectacle.
The 268 million view milestone is significant on at least three levels. First, it demonstrates extraordinary long-tail durability: most marketing assets see view counts plateau within weeks of release, but Trailer 1 continued to accumulate views at a sufficient rate over a 23-month window to overtake a Marvel film trailer that had been compounding views for more than five years (Shutler, 2025; LibertyCity, 2025). Second, it provided a measurable benchmark against which the second trailer — released on 6 May 2025 and credited by Rockstar with over 475 million cross-platform views in its first 24 hours — could be evaluated, although the two metrics are not directly comparable due to differences in measurement window and platform aggregation (Wikipedia contributors, 2026). Third, the milestone landed within the same news cycle as the second release delay, providing Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive with a substantial good-news counterweight to the negative coverage surrounding the delay and the 30 October 2025 firing of 34 Rockstar employees amid unionisation efforts (Wikipedia contributors, 2026).
LibertyCity (2025) GTA 6's First Trailer Becomes the Most Viewed in YouTube History. Available at: https://libertycity.net/news/gta-6/9439-gta-6s-first-trailer-becomes-the-most.html (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Shutler, A. (2025) "'Grand Theft Auto 6' now most-viewed trailer ever, overtaking 'Avengers: Infinity War'", NME, 11 November. Available at: https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/grand-theft-auto-6-most-viewed-trailer-avengers-infinity-war-3907467 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia contributors (2026) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).